Dispatch #35
Sunday, October 13
Princeton, Illinois

Before the rally in Cedar Rapids, an African American woman stepped toward me, smiling.

"Do you know who I am?"

Her eyes in particular looked familiar; something of the stoop in her shoulders, too.

Almost immediately I was searching someone else in this woman's face before me: her mother in this daughter's face! And just as I was about the hazard the daughter's name, Bertha, the woman in Cedar Rapids said, "Bertha Garner. Garner, though I was a Hildreth."

Of course. I had indeed met Bertha years ago in Evansville, Indiana, where I was pastor for Grace Lutheran Church and minister to her mother, whose name was Rozaline Hildreth. Bertha had come a-visiting her mother and brothers upon several important occasions. Of course!

Bertha has eyes whose lines fall into pools of a gentle sadness. When she looked up at me, it seemed an effort to lift her vision higher than hers, unto my own; but ever quickly there followed her smile. These were her mother's eyes, surely, but with this difference: Bertha is to me a sometime acquaintance; Rozaline was deeply my parishioner, my friend and the object of my lasting admiration. I knew in human detail, therefore, the weights behind the more elderly woman's eyes. I knew Rozaline very well.

Bertha and I chatted a little while--both before and after the rally--and then we parted. But she left with me a ten-page program of the Organ Concert which Rozaline's son, John W., had performed in Evansville this last August. "In Loving Memory," said the cover, "of Rozaline P. Hildreth, 1915-1998."

"John," Bertha said, "asked me to give this to you."

It lies open on the table now, at my left elbow.

+ + +

In 1962 I was a fourth-year student at Concordia in Milwaukee. Concordia was a prep school, preparing boys for the ministry, an all-male institution of 6 years altogether, 4 high school and 2 college years.

For much of my life I have tended to be solitary. In high school that trait was intense and painful. I wrote stories at night in dim light. I drew portraits in dark charcoals. And when the dorm rooms were filled with room-mates and the shattering noise of room-mates' friends, I would steal outside, would cross the lawns and climb the stairs of the old-stone central building to sit in an empty classroom in my own perfect silence.

One night in late autumn (I remember the chill in the classroom, the thermostat having been turned low to save expense and energy) my silence was interrupted by a brilliant chord on the chapel organ. The hall outside my classroom was dark. Well, and I had been so absorbed in my work that I couldn't have noticed another soul in the building with me. Chapel and classrooms were on the same story. My heart was in my throat.

That organ chord broke into its pieces, and then a most majestic music began to pour forth, filling the building, and I could not stay in the classroom alone.

I can still hear the piece. It's French. It takes my breath away. It creates its own light and landscape. And as I crept closer to the back chapel door, it grew and grew in strength, almost crushing my chest by its massive dance.

The chapel lights, likewise, were not on. Only in the front did one incandescent bulb burn low: the little lamp crooked over the music sheets and the keys of the organ. And sitting behind the keys, behind the light, swiveling at his waist, working the foot pedals as well as his hands and his fingers, was a rake of a man, skinny, long at all his extremities, a Black man whom I had not seen on campus before.

I sat in the back and sweated with wonder at the thing he could make an organ do.

When the final notes of the French Organ Music had flown away into silence, I got up and walked forward through the darkness and tried (after my shy fashion) to express my terrible gratitude for this man's music.

He looked at me through big, black-framed glasses, and did himself make humble sounds. In fact, he laughed at himself in a peculiar way: quickly inhaling two snifters of air over his teeth, then puffing his cheeks with a series of short exhalations. It was the twitching laughter of a small, whispering bird.

I learned his name that night (John) and felt honor for him on choir tours (when he accompanied our voices) in the chapel where he was the organist, and even at the Senior College in Fort Wayne where (again) he was the chapel organist. We didn't talk much. He seemed as much a solitary as I was (though by then I was acting in our theaters and might have appeared bolder than I was). The conversations we started on the tour busses quickly faded to silence.

After that I lost track of him, this John whose last name was Hildreth, whose fingers were as long as the searching bills of cranes, whose lean and lengthy body looped inward on itself like the necks of the same cranes, drinking. I did not immediately go on to the seminary with my classmates. Neither, I learned later, did John. I went for graduate degrees in English; he went likewise, but somewhere else in something else: in music.

+ + +

In 1974 I began to minister to a small African American congregation in the central city of Evansville, Indiana. I was thirty years old at that time. One of my first duties was to canvass the congregation's opinions on several existential questions: (1) Should it continue to exist or (since it worshipped with 35 to 40 people on a Sunday) should it "Close its doors," as the elderly members said. (2) And if it should continue, what sort of pastor would be best to serve Grace in this time of trial? Someone Black? Someone white?

To the first question, the answers were vague and unconvincing until we transformed the question itself: "Why should Grace Lutheran exist ... on this corner of Eliot and Gum, in this particular neighborhood, at this level of class and income? Suddenly the question was no longer vague. And when we assessed the talents and resources of our small congregation, suddenly we recognized a very good reason to stay (and therefore to be) working and worshipping right here: people needed what we had to give. And our longevity in this place had already earned the trust of the poor and the indigent. Yes, we would stay. Yes, we would be.

And to the second question, over and over again the individual parishioners declared the color didn't matter. What did matter (as Norma Malone told it to me one evening in her living room, one low bulb shining behind her copper skin): "Will that pastor stand by us? Stand by us in the hospital? Stand by us in the courts of law? Stand by us before the school officials? Stand by us before the police, in the prisons, under the prejudice of newspaper reporters and editors? I took her low recitation as a divine description of the pastor's job in this place ... and color did not enter in.

Therefore, when the congregation turned to me and directly asked me to be installed as its pastor, I knew what was asked of me.

Now: in those several days while I considered my response ("Yes, I will be your pastor," or "No, I cannot spend my life in the inner city") my mind kept flying to an elderly member of the church, her lifestyle, her sacred service.

How can I say "No" if Rozaline Hildreth is so much admired by me and honored and recognized as the genuine model of Christian service? How ever could I turn away?

Here was a sexagenarian woman of a long, raw frame, strong in her arm, stooped at the shoulder, sad in the lines of her eyes, steadfast in the accomplishment of the service set before her; here was a grandmother, raising her grandchildren in her own small house; here was a woman who lived, otherwise, alone, the sole authority, the dearest source of love her grandchildren knew morning and night; here was a philosopher who saw the world through the sad comedy of human error (her error inmixed with the errors of us all), for she and her husband did not live together any more, for she had personally lost two children by the time I came to know her, for in the years I served Grace thereafter (even until the late eighties) it was her great-grandchild she took again into her home, their primary source of care and caution and discipline and love.

Met and wrestled life, I say, through the eyes of a melancholy comic: for she laughed at it all. Rozaline Hildreth drew swift, short inhalations over her teeth, then puffed her cheeks with a series of quick, sibilant exhalations. Her eyes rose to a twinkle in the moment of this deprecating laughter. Immediately afterward her face fell (great cheeks fell, almost like the jowls of a bulldog) into a grave weightiness and sadness.

If Rozaline, I thought, could carry burdens both the weight of which and the humor of which she knew intimately, then why shouldn't, why couldn't I?

"Yes," I said with a level formality unto the members of Grace Lutheran Church. "Yes I accept your call. I will be your pastor."

Rozaline was that extraordinary sort of woman who could belong both to the Ladies Auxiliary and to the Semper Fidelis Circle without falling into gossip or jealousies.

I remember her as taller than I was or am.

I would drop by on an evening when, the children having been bedded, I'd find a water-clear drink resting cool on the white wooden mantle over her fire place, and only with the greatest restraint refuse a drink for myself.

The children were well-dressed. They attended school with their great-grandmother's faithfulness. They came, likewise, to Church and to Sunday School, and sang in our children's choir, the "Grave Notes." They were smart and proud and bold and handsome.

For hadn't this same woman raised children like John Wesley? Hadn't she brought genuine talent into the world and shaped it and sent it to good schools, and watched as John became an organist whose doctoral degree he earned from Northwestern University School of Music? Yes. And yes. And I did not know the connection to my Concordia friend until several years into my ministry.

Ah, John, what a woman it was who bore you and raised you! And in my later years I learned your earlier years in the bulldog face and the bulldog faithfulness of your mother, Rozaline.

She never sought counseling.

But we would sit together in the evenings; and she would speak of you, full Professor at Augustana, Rock Island, Illinois.

And you came down once to speak for our church's anniversary, and your mother's expressions (if not that fall of her face and the folds of so many years of labor) were suddenly yours, rounding out my own life's educations. In high school and then again in my forties I heard and recognized that same laugh, which shot me backward and forward through your generations.

Yes, yes, I do altogether understand your choice to offer an organ concert in memory of your mother, since so much of my service in the Church is modeled upon her: upon her bold ability to see sorrowful truths and not pour false sugar or platitudes upon them; upon the durable strength in her spirit and her bones; upon that snifter-laughter which put every troublous thing into its place in the scheme of God's attending.

Shortly before this woman's death in 1998 I was flown to Washington, D.C., there to receive a prestigious award from the Lutheran Institute which, with banquets and rich dress and expensive pleasures, fetes a handful of Lutherans every year for outstanding service and achievement.

But I didn't have a suit, let alone a tuxedo for the event. And the man who read my vita never once read or pronounced my name correctly. Wangerin veered closer to the "Wagner" I have never been. Other dignitaries receiving awards spoke of their own experiences, their own particular services which made them deserving.

I, John, in a fit of propriety (and of sorrow that things should be the way they are) spoke nothing of myself. With dare in my eye, I took twice my time to tell the story of your mother. "She," I said, "is the one who most deserves your honors this evening." Then I spelled her name and pronounced it loudly, three times over, so all the tailored and tuxedoed plenipotentiaries in the chandeliered ballroom before me might never pronounce her name with a foolish mis-utterance and demeaning ignorance.

R-O-Z-A-L-I-N-E P. H-I-L-D-R-E-T-H!

Honor her. Honor those like her, for these are the women who make musicians and pastors both.

Do not honor her as one "who stands behind" these more public children of hers. Honor her as the Seraph itself. For not all her children have flown high, nor have all her grandchildren or her great-grandchildren entered earthly glories. BUT SHE HAS LOVED THEM ALL AND EQUALLY! And the proof of that is how she loves those for whom they are responsible.

Her love, until the year she passed into God's heaven, was always a beginning thing, an initiating thing, a thing at the start of goodness and childhood and lives that need tending.

She was--and she still must be--the one who burns (painfully, brilliantly) in the presence of God: the Seraph, the Burning One, who by her life cries, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts! The whole earth is filled with his glory."

The whole earth.

The inner city.

The little church on the corner of Eliot and Gum.

Walt